Morale System

I think I have the basics for an pretty simple morale system for Beacon.  I like the idea of morale and especially the idea of  having to coax hired NPCs or companion animals to do dangerous things.  I'd really like to give more mechanical weight to charisma, and also more things or PCs to spend money on that have both narrative and game weight.  I was toying with different ideas but think I've settled on the simplest.  The base 'Morale' score for NPCs, henchmen, pets, etc. is 10 and can be modified plus/minus depending on game events and interactions.  When there is a situation that would call for a morale check then the GM just sets a DC for it and the player most involved makes a d20 roll just like any other check.  Send your war dog up against a bear might be a DC of 12, sending them to fight undead however might be a different story.  The higher their bonus and the more loyal they are, the more likely to pass that morale check.  And the other side as well.

SO pretty simple but what makes it work for me is the idea that this score is constantly tested and changes.  Certain situations should automatically modify morale, just like sanity in a Cthulhu game, so say every time the NPC fails a morale check they get -1 to morale.  If a party member dies the NPCs get -1 to morale from the shock.  Maybe its -2 if its a PC who dies, their confidence falters.  If they are mistreated or have to endure unpleasant treks or long boring waits, that's more -1s.  On the other side if the PCs treat them well, or they have a decisive victory, or if the PCs give them a share of loot then their morale would go up.  It would cap out at -10 (miserable) and +10 (fanatical) just to keep a lid on it, but the trend would be over time adventure situations should whittle away at morale and players will have to take remedial actions to woo back loyalty from long-term hirelings and henchmen.

Oh and I forgot, if an NPC misses 3 morale checks in a row they are done.  They leave, or run away with the players map, or something fun.  This is kind of like the 5th Edition death save except only on the failure end, one success will clear the tally but three strikes in a row and that NPC has had enough.

So now I need to make a table of morale changing events and put it into the rules in along with explanations for how it impacts hiring henchmen etc.  I already have a good idea how this would work with character expenses and have made a table for the lifestyle expenses PCs can choose from while in town.  Having PCs spend coin on keeping up a level of wealth will also sweeten the morale of their hirelings, the rich command more respect.  When PCs return to civilization they can choose how long they stay and what level or wealth they maintain, and this will impact their relations with NPCs as well as determine healing, access to training etc.  The morale modifier and Charisma bonus would be factored in to the starting morale of hirelings, everyone admires the rich man and wants to ride their coattails, but who wants to face danger for a slob in the gutter?

Living Expenses

When not exploring, characters will be in civilized or semi-civilized areas which will require daily expenses.  The lifestyle a PC choses will have an impact on how fast they can recover from their adventures, and also how the local NPCs will react to them.

Lifestyle	Cost/day	Description	Recovery	Social Modifier	Morale Modifier
Squalid	1 sp	Sleeping in stables.	Gain HP = level	Disadvantage	-2
Poor	5 sp	Cheap food, Shared common rooms and common houses	Gain 1/2 Hit Dice	Disadvantage	-1
Fair	10 sp	Good food and drink, private accommodation.	Gain all HP and 1 STAT point	None	0
Good	50 sp	Fine food and drink, clean private accommodation, access to facilities	Gain full HP, 1 STAT point, research and training allowed	Advantage	+1
Aristocrat	100 sp	Finest foods and drink, access to facilities, social opportunity, luxury accommodation	Gain full HP, 2 STAT, research and training.  Audience with notables.	Advantage	+2

I see this as an optional rule and it can be used when its useful and waved when its not interesting.  Maybe you only want to use it for hired hands and not for important NPCs like animal companions or apprentices.  Maybe you want to do the opposite and only track morale for important NPCs.  Or maybe use it for player characters who want to have reasons for interparty conflicts.  I am going to put the morale tracker on the Beacon character sheets primarily for when making more detailed NPCs, however I see no reason it couldn't be used for PCs as well as NPCs.  think it makes a good optional rule since some players might like to have a morale score as well to guide their roleplaying and others would just ignore it.  You could even have some players use it and others not use it in the same game, from a PC side it would just inform play, so the perfect optional rule.

Summer Update

I'm not positng much but I am running games and am still working on the 7.5 version of the Beacon rules and feel like I'm in the home stretch.  I've felt that before though and soon found out some big issue that needed to be sorted out.  So hopefully I'm in some kind of stretch anyway. The players in my weekly game are at level 7 and starting to use 4th level spells and also needing more complicated monsters and situations to keep things interesting.  The longer we play, the more the rules get tested so its been a much more productive process than I had in the past when I was running short one offs or just thinking about the game.

I'm mostly working on fixing the spells from levels 4-6, some of which I haven't touched since I originally put them in the book.  I did clean up the level 1-3 spells quite a bit, but the have not really worked over the higher level ones.  Some of these spells are not worth the casting cost, others are overpowered.   There are even references to systems and terms that don't exist in the game any longer.  I have decided that I want to do more to 'fix' or pin the spell effects and get rid of effects that get bigger based on caster level.  This is all to make it easier to understand the cost/value when you make the change from slot based to point based magic.  Slot based magic you can have powerful spells limited by per day use or just toss out some special effect as a novelty, but hit point based casting needs to be more balanced vs the cost in player survivability.   If you can cast fireball for 7 points a pop, it does not need to scale with your level, the scaling comes with the additional hit points you get.

The rate of character advancement seems very on point to me and the characters in the weekly game have gone from level 1 to level 7 in about a year of playing, although I am starting to see some issues with the amount of treasure they are accumulating and how much they can spend on equipment and leveling up.  I really need to add more big ticket items to the game since once you have plate mail or a couple hundred gold for transcribing spells there is little else to spend on except leveling up.  Beacon XP requirements to level are pretty simple line plots compared to the class based tables of BX/OSE or the sliding tiers of 5th edition.

My original thought on was two fold; to keep the formula dead simple so you always knew what was needed for the next level, and every level should take a little bit longer to get to than the last one.  I think that gives things a certain gravity and lets players get used to each step up in the game.  I am not sure the effort should be doubling,  but certainly a few more adventures than the last time.  I don't think this is happening even factoring in each level is 1000XP more than the last, its a pretty shallow rise.  Also it seems that by spending treasure and carrying over treasure from the last level, players are leveling up at a constant pace, or even having the level up rate accelerate as they run out of things to spend silver on.  

I've also noticed that I have to be very careful about how much treasure I am giving out even though the amount is already very low compared to most D20 fantasy campaigns.  As an example, in an adventure that took three sessions, the party rescued a bunch of dwarves and were rewarded 10,000sp (split 6 ways) by the King, which would be a laughable amount of treasure in 5th edition or even OSE, even accounting for the comparatively higher value of silver and gold in Beacon.  It would be nice to have some more things to buy and mechanisms to handle players with more inspiring amounts of treasure without breaking the game economy.

One thought on this was instead of spending silver to buy XP, I could separate the level experience point and silver piece requirements so that players would need to have the required 1000XP/level to advance and also spend silver equal to 1000 x their current level.  This would would increase the leveling curve from a 1/2/3/4... to a 2/4/6/8... and it would also make sure players couldn't just buy a level with silver they had lying around.  I like the idea and especially having the PC collect enough coin to level up making it an even bigger deal.   Right now PCs will toss a few coins at their XP like an investment account, or use them to top up after an adventure.  If they had to save up the cash and then drop it all on their next level, then its more memorable.   Narratively it is as if the PC was training and carousing, researching and otherwise spending money on improving their adventuring life.  I also think that having it split this way it would let GMs have two levers to control the leveling speed instead of just one.  You can adjust treasure and encounters to suit the pace you want to keep.

Other than this I am still tinkering with the rogue sneak attacks and trying to sort out how to make combat have interesting choices while streaming the crap out of it where I can.  I don't think anyone is really missing the rolls for damage and the Cinematic Advantage works really well.  I would like to lean into the initiative system so that Rogues and Hunters leverage a maneuver roll for their special attacks.  I like the idea of Rogues using a d6 for sneak attack and having a one round cool down, the choice here when to use this and when to try for Cinematic Advantage seems interesting to me and, more balanced than either making them roll to hide or giving them additional damage every round.  I would like to give the Hunter an option to roll a d10 maneuver which would let them choose between aiming (for automatic advantage), or doing a double shot which would give them double the weapon damage (and use up ammo twice as fast).

I'll try to get all this in to a usable state soon and push out the update this fall.  I did notice that the 2020 Microlite omnibus still has the version 6 rules for Beacon which seem so clunky now compared to what's been changed this last year and a half.  It would be good to get to a point where I would be happy to get them to go with the newer one.

Quick update for May

This is just a short update as I've been pretty bad at keeping the blog updated.  I'm still playtesting, running a weekly and a bi-weekly game, and that is going very well.  Players are creeping up to level 6 in the longest running game and I think that the advancement/experience rate is holding up pretty well.  Having the players run through levels 1-6 in about a year seems like a good pace and it gives time for all of us to feel out each new rise in capability.

The Communication skill is being re-labeled as Communion.  I think that this is a broader term and so it is more suitable as a skill.  Communication already was prime skill for clerics and enchanters and doing the work for things like leadership tasks, praying, noticing details etc. and Communion fits that role a lot better.  So now you are meditating with a magic orb? Communion check.  Trying to keep an angry mob calm - Communion check.  The leopard king is raving and you need to figure out what he wants?  Communion check.  All that and the short form COMM doesn't change, so I consider that a nice bonus.

I'm still tweaking combat actions, especially how maneuvering can give advantage.  For a long while players were taking a lot of time to roll both an attack and a maneuver for every round of combat in order to maximize their attack dice, and this was starting to bog down the game.  I think I cracked it when I heard about Cinematic Advantage which I thought I was doing, but wasn't exactly.  I had players making rolls to maneuver around and use the environment to get advantage yes, but there was no cost to it and so they were spending too much time doing it and it was bogging things down.  Cinematic Advantage is clever because if you fail you get disadvantage, and that's the part I was missing.  My more tactically minded players were ALWAYS trying to get advantage since there was no risk.  This was bogging things down as some players were making 3-4 rolls every round trying to get that extra dice and monopolizing the combats.  When they failed they just got a regular action.  With that risk of disadvantage in place now they seem to be more cautious and use that mechanic less often.  It also immediately made for more exciting fights as players got into trouble more often when they tried to be fancy and instead found themselves down on one knee or surrounded by opponents. 

Last thing I want to mention is adding rituals for Druids.  Since Druids came back into the Divine Magic fold I've been trying to rework their spell list and also sort out how they should manage animal companions which I decided they should get at level 3.  I've decided to make some rituals for them, similar to the cleric rituals.  Level 2 ritual is summon animal companion and the Druid has to go vision quest for while in the wilderness and then gets to roll for a bunny or an ostrich or whatever animal choses them.  Real high rolls and they could get a magic creature or an elemental maybe.  None of this spirit horse comes back from the dead, fits in your pocket crap from 5th edition either, these guys need food and places to sleep and die if they are killed.  Also if you treat them poorly or as cannon fodder then the next vision quest is going to go sour.  I highly recommend tossing karma into that ritual.

Roll20 Sheet updated

The new version of the Roll20 character sheet is up, I pushed the code to github and thought it might take a couple weeks but they pushed it right away and so I haven't had a lot of time to write up a good blog post on the subject.  My idea to publish something on the Beacon Blog weekly is not going to happen and although I am hoping to meet a monthly schedule, honestly I'm pretty happy with the pace of the playtesting and the recent changes to the sheet.  No reason to complain about that.

The new sheet has a bunch of changes.  It looks prettier with a less crowded layout and more colour.  I incorporated the Beacon logo colours into the page headers and the repeating list controls.  I cleaned up the fonts, added a new Notes tab and moved spellboox to the end of the sheet. I put in a minimum and maximum width for the sheet so it doesn't compress or expand and throw off the labeling. 

I added in a lot more fields for notes. I found personally that one or two large text boxes on a roll20 sheet does not work like a paper sheet where you can write little notes everywhere.  Having more smaller boxes lets you organize better and keep smaller bits of info easier to read.  I also put in some boxes for tracking conditions like a sickness or if your character is encumbered.

Aside from those cosmetic type changes I fixed an issue where chainmail was not the right AC and where wearing heavy armour would remove dexterity penalties and not just dexterity bonuses.  I also fixed some of the weapon damage calculations and separated out attack bonuses and damage bonuses so you could model a spear that gives damage bonus but actually have an attack penalty.  This makes customizing weapons much more flexible.  I moved a lot of the weapons and armour detail into expandable sections that players can hide away most of the time, and I added note fields.  I also fixed the maximum range calculations on ranged weapons so they display now.  I also added in a repeating section for companions and henchmen where players can note many common attributes for a hired hand or their apprentice or animal companion.  I also rebranded/recalculated the coin totals to be in silver as well as companion wages.  Beacon is a Silver standard game so that fits better with the theme and reminds everyone to scale down appropriately.

The biggest change was adding encumbrance/inventory system.  The encumbrance system was hard to sort out because it has to be both simple and flexible but also contain a good amount of automation or it will never get used.  The last version of the sheet had a simple spot for players to keep track of their carried load and did the strength calculation for them.  This NEVER got used.  Players just won't use a system that requires even this level of manual bookkeeping and I get that.  Either its just not their thing or they do like to do it but get caught up in something else and then the tally gets messed up over time anyway.  I decided what I would try was to do as much as possible in the sheet, but not sweat the small stuff which resulted in a hybrid system where I automated as much as I could but added in namable 'container' items with a load value that would store all the odds and ends.

What that resulted in was four interworking systems to track encumbrance: consumables, combat, coins and item/containers. Encumbrance for weapons and armour is calculated from equipped types, as are the most common consumables like rations and torches, tracking coin weights was already implemented, and finally these large items/containers would manage everything else.  My view of this is that the more opt-in you automate the more likely the system will get used so having players just focused on keeping track of large items and packs and sacks in a little widget was the perfect level of interaction.  You can always ignore the whole encumbrance system but I'm finding more and more that it powers that exploration vibe I like. 

The weapons and armour opt-in to the encumbrance system by default when you add the item row and you can uncheck them if you need to drop them.  Armour has different encumbrance if its work vs carried and the sheet can track that.  You can add as many items and containers as you like and they have both inventory and note text boxes as well as a checkbox if you decide to drop one somewhere.  The rows of small item trackers have a location field so you can list what container they are in etc.  All in all I think it adds a lot to the game having this in the sheet.

I'm pretty excited to see how this will work in game, it seems like the right handshake between automation and player participation in the system.  Its also a lot prettier than it was before.

Updates for the Character Sheet

I've been thinking of some updates to the Roll20 character sheet and finally got my butt in gear to make the changes. A big part of this Beacon renaissance I've embarked upon is to make Beacon very friendly for online play over Roll20 (for now) and I want to leverage the online sheets for tracking anything a player might want to track for their character.  The new character sheets have been a great facilitator to play so far and so I'm trying to build on that success.  I spend some time cleaning things up and refactoring some of the code from the last couple updates. I made the labels bigger in general and tried to clean up any bugs.  I fixed an issue with level 5 spells not expanding properly and also updated the AC bonus on chainmail.  I did update the page section headers to make them more colourful as well as apply a similar colour scheme to the repeating item buttons.

One bigger addition was to add was a section for companions, be they hired goons, apprentices or animal companions.  Players are using companions a lot and also there is some work I want to do to beef up animal companions for Druids so I like having this on the online sheet and not on a notepad or google docs somewhere. 

I wanted to make it simple and leverage the spellbook idea of tucking away the details when not needed. I inherited some pretty good examples for this code from the original sheet designers so it was pretty simple to add it in.  I originally tried to fit this onto the Inventory page but after seeing how busy that section was getting I added it to the Combat tab.  Hopefully there is enough meat in this section to handle anything a player might want to track about a hireling or their pet owlbear.

Now players have a handy list of their companions and can track their HP and check the box off when they get killed by a norker right on the sheet, but if you click the notes button there is plenty of room for all sorts of inventory and comments.  It will even track how much you owe them.

While doing this I liked having two smaller text boxes instead of the one large textbox the spell section used, so I also updated the spellbook section to split descriptions and notes into two text boxes.

The next change was similar and revolves around the ongoing war I have with encumbrance. I also wanted to automatically calculate encumbrance to make it easier for players to manage, but not to the point of getting down to item weights etc.  I can't see tracking statistics of  every item on the sheet like the 5e sheet does, and I also didn't want to have to have players add the weight of every item by hand because they would never do it.  They didn't even always do the estimated total weight carried in the rules very often.  I settled on a meet in the middle approach.  I want to try using a weight input box on various containers and large items and calculate the totals on that instead.  I figure a player can say I put x in a sack and it weighs 2 or this backpack carries 5 weight.  I also wanted to give the ability to drop things so that when player run or loose something it can stay on the sheet but not be totaled into the encumbrance.

In order to do this I had to add in containers in the inventory section that could be named and have toggles like armour does.  This would let us easily track if they were being carried or not so I could calculate carried encumbrance.  These containers, like the companions tuck away on the sheet so you don't have to deal with a wall of text.  I also added in the weight of coins and the weights of common consumables like rations.  I think this will enable some easy and fun gameplay around dropping off caches of items while exploring or modeling how a sack of loot could be dropped in a chase scenario.

For backwards compatibility I had to leave the old inventory sections at the bottom.  I would hate to roll out an updated sheet and have Beacon players in the wild loose their items!  These sections are at the bottom of the sheet and don't really take up much room though.  I'm still testing these changes but I think its pretty good chance that this will be pushed up soon.

Happy Beaconing.

2021 resolutions

Last year I resolved to take Beacon out and polish it up a bit.  I think I managed to do that and I'm pretty happy with what I managed to get done.  Initially I was hoping to fix some outstanding things and build the game out a bit for online play.  Over the year I ran two playtesting groups through numerous wilderness and dungeon crawls taking them from level 1 up to around level 4.  I took some notes and get player feedback on what they did and didn't like.  I wound up making a lot more changes than I expected but I think that these changes were pretty good and took the game up a notch.  With the direction I got from this experiment I have a better idea of what works and what does not and for 2021 I want to double down on this direction and really polish the game up.  I'm still running games weekly and I even added a new biweekly group for a short term playtest and I'm hoping to get even more feedback.

There are still a lot of things to do and the main groups are now coming into the middle levels 5-8 which will expose more issues and illuminate more interesting designs to keep play fast and fun.  I got pretty busy at the tail end of 2020 and wasn't able to keep the blog up to date or push out many rules updates in the last couple months.  I do want to keep track of how the design has evolved, so here is a brief synopsis of the some of the things I figured out from the 2020 playtesting:

Character death and HP economy:

There were some character deaths but not a large number.  Initially there was a problem where using STR points to soak damage and low level players had way too much tanking ability - even more than 5e.  This skewed the game difficulty way down.  This was solved by taking out that option and adding condition penalties for loosing too many STR points in one shot.  PCs still have a bigger life buffer than in systems like OSE or Labyrinth Lord but its now more comparable with 5th edition if you consider that systems taking HD and the death saves.  Moving caster emergency spending away from STR and into their primary Stat also cleaned that up a bit.  The feedback I got on this topic was that players liked the way STR damage became the resource governing how long they could continue exploring.

Spell casting:

Players most always don't like the HP spend to cast spells even when its pointed out that Beacon casters get more HP to start and spell use is more available at lower levels than in most OSR systems (not even going to argue about 5th edition's overpowered cantrips).  One of the big positive changes to spells was adding way more skill influence to spell effects and beefing up many spells that work under a Vancian magic system but not when using spell points.  I also removed HP loss when a spell fails (except for fumbles) which I think helped balance things a lot more.  Players requested I lower the cost of transcribing spells from 50gp to 10gp and that seems to have been good move, incentivizing that activity.  Spell casters generally seem to play very conservative on casting and I do want to keep that feeling of magic being risky, although I also want them to take on the additional risk when its warranted.   I believe originally there was a big double dip effect where casters would feel it too risky to burn STR points for emergency spell casting but changing this to use the casters primary Stat I think solves this problem.  Hopefully this bears out, but the players really haven't used this option yet, possibly since so few are playing spell casters.  Aside from this I'm interested in watching and fixing the middle level game for spell casters.  I have a number of players playing clerics but I think I need more play testing of spell casters, especially at these higher levels.  

Encumbrance:

This is never popular but having players truck 3 suits of armor, 5 swords, 30 days of rations and 15 flasks of oil into the field really does make the game suffer.   In exploration games you need to have resource management to force players to problem solve, take risks and interact with the environment.  I put in a simple tally system to track items and it was not popular even with players who agreed it was desirable.  I think some players are coming around but I need to fine tune this, likely by increasing the base carry amount slightly and adding better tools in the character sheet.  I want to expand the inventory page so that players can label and equip containers and note the weight of items in the containers.  I don't want to totally automate it because it would be near impossible, but I can facilitate it better.

Hirelings, pets and companions:

Some of the players really jumped on this and it did make the game interesting.  The purpose of this is to beef up parties, drain away some coin and to provide interesting logistics.  However players were really leveraging this, some having whole packs of war dogs or hiring 3-4 body guards.  I don't want to discourage this but I did see that limiting it by cost alone wasn't going to work.  I raised prices on hirelings and especially skilled fighters.  I've also decided to link the number of companions a PC can manage to the PCs communication skill.  This I think is a great idea since it beefs up the skill, making it much more desirable, as well as shift the advantage of having larger retune to Clerics, Druids and Enchanters.  Shifting the combat benefits of companions to these classes is good I think.  I can even see developing some spells that might multiply those benefits.   I also saw a lack of support for managing pets and hirelings in the online character sheet and want to add a section to the inventory page for companions and pets.

Using modules and adventures:

Note to my play-testers: here be spoilers.

Its no surprise that found a number of really good resources and adventures in the OSR community.  You certainly could run Beacon in a save the world campaign or in a court intrigue setting, but really its built for gritty fantasy, treasure hunting and exploration type games.  I found it really easy to translate most OSR adventures to Beacon either by just matching up simple monster stats in Beacon or by converting the monsters into ascending AC and beacon HD based initiative and damage on the fly.  I do think that the power level of monsters in Beacon should be closer to 5e than OSE/Labyrinth Lord stats as the players have generally had too easy a time on most monsters.  My favorite resources for Beacon adventuring would have to be the stuff by Michael Prescott, which I find super well done and evocative.  The quality of the stuff he's putting out is humbling.  However for a more complete toolkit I have been using Greg Gillespie's Barrowmaze and Forbidden Caverns of Archaia.  I bought the Labyrinth Lord versions of these books as PDF and adjust the monster stat blocks on the fly, but I think that the 5th edition versions of the books may be more suitable to run Beacon games out of the box.  Running these modules had a lot of influence on my standardizing Beacon travel and rest systems around a 4 hour watch as well as how I do random encounters.  They are really really great resources.

How to Play - Create a character

Creating a character in Beacon is a quick process whether you use the Roll20 character sheet or use paper sheets for tabletop games.  The basics are pretty simple and the same for both online and at table.  The online sheet will summarize many of the starting skills and bonuses for the different races and classes you can choose from, but the character creation section in the rulebook is still essential as it contains more this information in detail and also has some helpful tables for reference.  It also contains all the items and equipment.

Creating a Character:

First roll for your character's core abilities/statistics.

• Roll and total 3 six sided dice to determine your character's Strength (STR)
• Strength is important as it effects how much damage you can withstand and gives bonuses for melee combat.
• Roll and total 3 six sided dice to determine your character's Dexterity (DEX)
• Dexterity is important as it can make you harder to hit and gives bonuses for missile attacks and challenges requiring accuracy.
• Roll and total 3 six sided dice to determine your character's Mind (MIND)
• Mind is important as it is the gives bonuses for arcane magic and intellectual challenges.
• Roll and total 3 six sided dice to determine your character's Charisma (CHA)
• Charisma is important as it gives bonuses for divine magic and personality challenges.

Next based on your rolls, examine the class and race modifiers and determine what kind of class and character race you might want to play.  

Its helpful to get an idea of a class and then choose a race that will compliment that class by adding additional points to your starting abilities and skills.  

• Fighters do well with high STR as they will be able to take and deal more damage.
• Rogues do well with good DEX score as it is compliments their combat ability and is useful for many skill challenges.
• Hunters do well with high DEX as it compliments their special combat abilities.
• Mages and Enchanters do well with a good MIND skill.
• Clerics and Druids do well with higher CHA.

Skills represent the learning and training your character has, your starting skills come from your character race and the class you choose but you will also get more skills every level.  Skills are used to modify your rolls in challenges and also can be requirements for certain actions  The skills are:

• Physical
• Physical skill helps with physical challenges like jumping or climbing.  This skill also determined if you can use heavier weapons and armours.  Good for fighters, clerics and hunters.
• Subterfuge
• Subterfuge skill helps with being sneaky, tricky and things like hiding.  Rogues and other sneaky people.
• Knowledge
• Knowledge skill helps with research, lore, and similar challenges.  It's also very useful for reading scrolls and impacts many spells.  Important for mages and enchanters but also good for rogues.
• Communication
• Communication skill helps with understanding or persuading challenges.  This skill impacts managing your hirelings or companions.  Clerics and druids leverage this but it is helpful for others too.
• Survival
• Survival skills are things like tracking, finding resources etc.  The hunter, druid and the rogue benefit most from this skill.
• Crafting
• Crafting skills are used to assess, repair or build things.  Higher crafting allows for repairing heavier armour and weapons.  Fighters, mages and rogues will find this useful.

You can also just choose your character race and class based on what you want to play instead of looking for the most optimal choices.  Beacon is designed to be focused on player actions and character progression, and in the longer term the skills you choose and the class benefits will outweigh the initial character bonuses.  Also it can be fun to play a clumsy but clever rogue or a un-personable druid with great physical strength.  Your character will be your in game persona so think about more than just how many points of damage you can do and choose something you will enjoy playing.

Your starting hit points will be the maximum hit die for your character race.  Elves and Halflings start with 6 hp, Humans and Dwarves 8hp, and Beastmen start with 10hp.  Remember fighters get a bonus of 1hp per level.

Once you have chosen a race and class apply the appropriate bonuses and starting skills to your character sheet.  The Roll 20 sheet will calculate many of the class and level bonuses for you, otherwise figure out your starting to hit and damage bonuses etc.

Lastly you need to roll your starting money so you can buy equipment.  Roll 2 six sided dice and that is how many gold coins you start with.   1 gold coin is worth 10 silver pennies and most common goods are priced in silver at the shops.

The most important purchases will be weapons, armour and a little food.  If your using the online sheet your armour class, weapon statistics etc. will be calculated for you as you add them.  Otherwise update your character sheet with your armour class and the weapon information from the rule book.  Don't forget to calculate you encumbrance based on how much you are carrying.

The roll20 character sheet has two modes, play mode and update mode.  The update mode is where you will set your skills and character base stats, choose you race and class and set your hit points.  While play mode is where you will track your current status, your experience points, log weapons and armour and where you will keep your inventory.

update mode

play mode (tabbed)

Creating higher level characters:

To start with a higher level character you do the above as well as add an additional skill point for each level as well as any skills for that class at the desired level.  E.g. a third level fighter would get two skill points to add as they wish as well as 1 additional Physical. 

Roll your race specific hit die (e.g. D6, D8) for each level and add this to your HP total.  Remember again fighters get a bonus of 1hp per level.

Roll 1d6 of additional starting gold coins per level.